Category Archives: From Salome to Hollywood

“Old ladies and old gentlemen are my weakness . . .”

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“I don’t want you to be too grown up when you come – I just want a sweet little girl and everyone will love you. I think Randy will be crazy about you.” Rose Hicks wrote from her office at 250 West 57th Street* as she watched the majestic S.S. Leviathan steam out of its birth on the North (Hudson) River. “Someday we’ll sail on her,” she promised Jane. In June 1930 Rose had so many plans for their future together. First Jane and her brother Dick had to travel from Manhattan Beach to her Manhattan. Rose would insist — as soon as the court order came through allowing the children to leave California — that they come by ship. As the summer wore on, the correspondence between Rose and her niece was more affectionate and more playful. But when Rose mentioned that she’d heard Jane was overweight and Dick was too thin, Jane bristled.

“I am very healthy thanks to the powers that be, and 15 years of the right bringing up, but fat! God forbid. Everyone around here still calls me “Little Jane” but I know you will think I am enormous as I’ve grown so much since you were here. I’m 5 foot 1 1/2 inches.” It was a Saturday late in June and Jane was “making the manse sparkle” while Dick drove their grandmother in Teresa into Los Angeles “to water Gram’s yard.” Jane loathed housework — “I do love to cook but that’s all.”

Most of all she wanted to impress her Uncle Randolph whom she had never met. She had chosen “slogans” from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar for people she liked. This one (slightly misquoted) she told him, seemed to suit him: “His was a gentle life and the elements so mixed in him, that Nature might stand up and say to all the world –’this is a man.’” And how happy she was that he admired her sketches! ” I’m so glad Uncle Randolph likes the foolish little things I draw. I love ART but not the kind they teach at Redondo High . . ” The art teacher had told her she had “marvelous ability” but did not like the fact that Jane drew “cartoons” of people and animals on the sides of her mechanical drawing sheets. So Jane, alas, had never had an “A” in Art.

According to Daysie Hall’s will, “Mrs. Randolph Hicks of New York,” was  the custodian of her two children “with full power of attorney to take care of their interests in the way she deems best.” Because she lived in New York and Virginia, Rose would not officially be their legal guardian until the end of 1930 when Jane and Dick had spent some time with her. In the meantime, she and her 60-year-old husband prepared to become    parents for the first time. One thing was clear. Randolph Hicks could no longer afford to retire — the financial roller coaster that was to plague even the most prosperous families during the 1930s had only just begun. Still, the Hickses were among the more fortunate Americans as they focused on their priorities for Jane and her college-age brother.

Rose Sutton Parker Hicks in Virginia circa 1932

At forty-eight, Rose Hicks’ ebony hair had  turned white but her large black eyes still intrigued new friends and intimidated others when she was displeased.** She was a polished, well-read and well-traveled woman with a keen mind and unlimited curiosity. Her husband, a scholar of Latin and history as well as the law, appreciated her high standards and her intellect. And, she would tell her niece, “he loves me because I have a lot of character—he likes that better than anything else.” By the time they married in 1919, Randolph Hicks had kept his business interests in Norfolk, Virginia but transferred his law practice to the prestigious firm of Satterlee, Canfield and Stone on Wall Street. Rose and Randolph’s social life was an extension of his work; they moved in exclusive circles among accomplished men and their  prominent wives. (Herbert Satterlee’s wife, Louisa, was the eldest daughter of J.P. Morgan.)

R.Randolph Hicks at Poplar Springs in Virginia circa 1932

An eminent trial lawyer, Randolph was also indispensable to his former partner, Arthur J. Morris, who had established the Morris Plan system of industrial banks that gave average Americans installment credit for the first time. Throughout Daysie Hall’s illness, he had done everything he could to support her and his niece and nephew: “The house in Virginia is gradually being built and when it is finished we shall expect to have you there, perhaps we may be able to find a horse for you,” he wrote to Jane as the finishing touches were being put on his fieldstone home at Poplar Springs Farm in Fauquier County, Virginia.

Although Jane may not have known all the details of her uncle’s career or the full extent of her aunt’s plans for her, she was aware that her life was about to change dramatically. Over the next decade the question would be could she remain true to herself in this new world? Rose had asked  if she had ever been out on a date without a chaperone. “Far from it,” Jane fired back. She assured her aunt that she had “no desire to make herself ‘common.’ I have never been “‘out’” at all anyway. Old ladies and old gentleman are my weakness.” It seems that the boys she had met so far called her a “wisey” and were not too keen on her sassy personality. And like many gifted children, both she and Dickie were at times more at ease with adults than some of their peers.

During moments when she was alone with her thoughts, Jane grappled with her faith; she had remained a Catholic ever since Rosa Sutton—their Gram– had taken both Jane and Dick to St. Vincent’s Catholic Church in Los Angeles to sponsor their baptism on Christmas Eve, 1919. (Dickie was then seven and Jane four.) Jane adored her Gram — they had the same strong-willed streak that Rose also shared. She went to a Catholic Church on Sundays even after her mother leaned toward Christian Science, and she loved being around the sisters whose good, clean, plain, faces “make you feel a little holy to talk to them.” Jane had been to a Catholic school in the first grade. In 1928 – before it was clear that her mother was desperately ill – she had hoped to go to St. Mary’s Academy for girls in Los Angeles as a boarder. That would have pleased her grandmother who had been educated in a convent school, but it was not to be. Fortunately, Redondo Union High School had worked out well.

So Rose would have make sure that her free-spirited and quite spiritual niece fit into the narrow slice of New York and Virginia society that she and her husband frequented. She had been a newcomer to this world just ten years earlier and knew what was expected of the family of an attorney with old Virginia (British, protestant and patriarchal) roots, and memberships in The (Episcopalian) Church Club of New York and the all- male Metropolitan Club. A private school for young ladies that fostered strong values and a sense of propriety might be just right for Jane’s last two years of high school. After all, she was unusually smart, perceptive and eager to please —  that would help.

How relieved Rose must have been that Dick’s immediate future had been settled. He would attend The University of Virginia – her husband’s alma mater — and Rose had no doubt that his scholarly abilities would serve him well. But just to be sure he made a good impression among their friends, she would list him in the New York Social Register*** as “Richard Hall;” the name “Dick Wick” did not sound quite right. How that list of socially prominent families would have amused Dick’s father whose “Salome Sun” poked fun at just such pretensions!

 

*For a time, Rose worked for Randolph’s close friend and client William C. Durant after they both lost a great deal during the Depression.

**During the 1909 high profile naval investigation into her brother’s death, reporters commented on the then Mrs. Parker’s mesmerizing black eyes.

***Originally there were 18 annual volumes of this list of notable families (usually with Dutch and English ancestry) representing 26 cities. Today there is one definitive book “listing the nation’s foremost families.”

This is post number 13 in the series. Please use the contact tab at the top of the paint for any comments or suggestions. For the entire series so far go to the Blog tab at the top of the page and scroll down to the beginning.

 

 

“I’m caught in the mesh of the desert’s grip. . .”

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As her sophomore year came to a close, fifteen-year-old Jane Hall left her friends and teachers at Redondo Union High School for the last time; perhaps she would miss the editors who had encouraged her career as a writer most of all. Down came the sign on the front door of 1148 Manhattan Avenue that identified her as manager of the local office of the Redondo Daily Breeze. Now her mission was keep the house in Manhattan Beach running smoothly until she and her brother could leave California to join their aunt and uncle in New York.

For several weeks after her mother died, Jane’s natural exuberance remained dormant under a cloud of grief. It was almost impossible to “take it on the chin.” Please tell me “you love me better than ANYBODY in the world except Uncle Randolph and Gram and Dick,” she wrote to her Aunt Rose. It helped that she was preoccupied by so many responsibilities. First on the list was her brother’s graduation from Redondo Union High School on June 13, 1930.  Dickie had just turned 18 and still needed new shoes, a white shirt and a black tie. Along with their class pictures in the yearbook, the High Tide, each senior listed his or her “Ambition,” “Fatal Failing” and “Hobby.”

Dick Wick Hall, Jr. R.U.H.S. Graduation June 13, 1930

Dick said he wanted to be “a famous lawyer,” his flaw was “studying” and his hobby “books.” His classmates predicted that in 10 years he would be the world chess champion and “owner of the Toledo Blade.” And there was a bit of a poet in Dick as well. An entire page of the 1930 Pilot was devoted to “My Harvest,” which he wrote before his mother died. With a lighthearted resignation that would have made his parents proud, Dick Wick Hall, Jr. proclaimed his willingness to accept the arrival of the Reaper. It ends,

Let there be a joyous harvest;
When my time comes, let me laugh.
On my tombstone in the Valley
Please inscribe this epitaph:

“When the reaper came to get me
With his blade and sickle slim,
When he came he found me smiling,
Ready to be garnered in.”

But Dickie was not the least bit domestic and arthritis confined seventy-year-old Rosa Sutton to being an emotional support for her grandchildren. So that left Jane to organize their packing, to be The Caretaker, The Responsible One; it was a role that would be central to her self-image for the rest of her life.

Dick Wick Hall’s brother Ernest had been looking out for their property in Salome since 1927; he would continue to do so. In July, Jane and Dick made a final trip to Arizona to ship some of their father’s belongings – including his desk – by freight to Casanova, Virginia where Rose and Randolph Hicks were adding two bedrooms to third floor of their country retreat for their niece and nephew. During this last visit to Salome, Jane came across this informal snapshot (one of my favorites), probably taken when she was about nine and Dickie about twelve. Here they are, “The Three” as

Daysie Hall with Dick and Jane in Salome circa 1924

Jane would call them after her father died. When the two orphans faced their new life 3000 miles away, their character and resilience would be tested. Jane would find very different material to write about as she made new friends in rural Virginia and New York City. And yet for the rest of her life, the dry, rugged wide-open sand hills and mountains in what was then Yuma County remained part of her “heart and soul;”  she said as much in her “Ode to the Desert.” How she would have loved Arizona’s Centennial Celebrations that are in full force this week!

I had one brief respite
From a city’s blare;
So I left for the wasteland’s blight,
And the torrid glare
Of a desert sun.

A bare six days in that silent heat I spent;
But the lure of the stars, and the gaunt mesquite,
And the pulsing throb
Of a raw life’s beat
All worked their spell,
And I knew what living meant.

The realization brought terrible toll
For I’m caught in the mesh
Of the desert’s grip . . .
Heart and soul.

I have seen black hills
On a flame-red sky,
And stood in the spot
Where echoes die.

I have thrilled to the feel
Of a desert night,
That soothes like a gentle hand
Each stunted tree and sickly bush
In the whole of that fevered land.

At last I have known the warm caress
Of an evening wind and I’ve felt the dawn
Brush past my cheek, and hurry on
To its noonday reek of burning sand, and blistered flesh,
And dust-dry water-holes . . .
Ah, such a brief, brief week.

Well I’m here again,
With the milling throng,
But now my aim is fixed and strong.
All I want is a one-room shack,
Painted by sunset glow . . .
I promised the desert I’d come back,
And some day, I shall go.

 

Many thanks to Therese Martinez and the Archive staff at Redondo Union High School for their help in locating information about Jane Hall and her brother Dick Wick Hall, Jr.

 This is post number 12 in the series. Please use the contact tab at the top of the paint for any comments or suggestions. For the entire series so far go to the Blog tab at the top of the page and scroll down to the beginning.  Happy Anniversary Arizona!

 

 

“With you, my heart and soul have flown . . .”

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“An American Paper for the American People – The Great Newspaper of the Great Southwest—The Paper for People Who Think.” The Los Angeles Examiner was bold in its claims and on February 18, 1930, for the Hall family, it was the paper to read. On the front page of Section Two a short article proclaims: “Manhattan Beach Girl, 14, Proving Literary Prodigy.” That may have been enough to inspire another reporter from a feature service to make an appointment with Jane (who was actually 15) the next day. “Desert Humorist’s Daughter Writes, Too,” by Donovan Roberts came out in at least one and possibly several papers. Jane was so excited. She told Mr. Roberts that her goal was to be a novelist, not a humorist. “‘I guess daddy was the only humorous one of the family. And besides, humorists are so glum and work so hard to be funny.’ ” During Roberts’ visit to 1148 Manhattan Avenue, he also spoke to Daysie who explained that she never saw Jane’s work until after it was published. And if the stories were rejected, “‘I don’t see them at all,’ says Mrs. Hall, quite proudly.”

Jane immediately wrote her Aunt Rose that “my picture and biography will be in 100 different papers all over the United States! It’ll probably be in some New York papers so maybe you’ll see it.” She also mailed her a clipping of an Arizona Republican  story (February 23, 1930) called “An Arizona Girl Is on the Way.” Again the reference was to a “literary prodigy on the coast over whom the Los Angeles newspapers are raving and in whom Arizonans must feel a proprietary interest.” And Jane’s happy news continued. Thanks to the generosity of a family friend, she and Dickie had tickets to see “The Love Parade,” starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald in her first role. The musical comedy, director Ernst Lubitsch’s first “talkie,” had its general release in January 1930. Over the next few years all the studios would reorganize to incorporate dialogue into their pictures. In less than a decade Jane Hall would benefit greatly from this revolution in the history of film.

Daysie Hall circa 1927- How she loved hats!.

Throughout March and April of 1930, Jane and Dick had high hopes their mother’s health would improve. Daysie was not up to writing letters, but Jane reported on April 27 that she cheered up every time she heard from Rose – “Things are beginning to look much brighter, I Really think mother is going to make the grade.” In the meantime, Jane – the expert chef – kept their household on a strict budget: “When we spend something, we get something,” she assured her aunt. “I’ll bet Silas Marner would think I was a tight-wad.” Rose wrote again on April 28 to remind Daysie that she thought of her all the time. “Rest as much as possible and you will be surprised how that will help you improve. Remember you have nothing to worry about except getting better. Lots of love my darling, from Rose.”

That spring Rose Hicks took a job at the office of William C. Durant, one of her husband’s clients and a close friend who had founded General Motors. For she and Randolph, along with many of their prosperous contemporaries, including the Durants, had experienced huge losses in the Wall Street crash. Not even the 2.9% of Americans who were invested in the market realized they had entered what would be a multi-year Depression. And so it was with a certain amount of resignation on or about May 11 that Rose read a shocking letter from her frantic niece. Daysie was back at The California Hospital and, just as Jane had feared two years earlier, the all too imaginable had happened.

“Mother is much worse– can hardly turn her head and I suspect that she was delirious part of the day. I went to see her after school. Oh, if only I didn’t have to go to school! I hate it! And she was very sick, Aunt Rose, I don’t know what’s the matter with her. The doctor thinks Cappy is a serious matter but he doesn’t seem to attribute mother’s [latest] illness to that. He doesn’t know. Nothing has been said about an operation as yet and I think it’s a rotten hospital and the doctors are nonentities. Mother is beginning to get awfully discouraged and dissatisfied. (I can’t spell tonight) They’re charging $126 a week (nurses and room and FOR WHAT?) She is ten times as bad as she was when she went, a week ago. . . .”

Should she leave school? Jane wanted to and she felt helpless.” If only they’d let me stay with her at the hospital she would be all right but they won’t and she’s getting worse all the time. Aunt Rose everybody said she’d be better there but she isn’t. What shall we do? If anything happened to mother it would be all off with me but nothing will happen to her will it? I’m also glad you’re going to write every day. Things seem so sort of bleak. Aunt Rose I hate to wire collect any time. If I don’t have the money, I just don’t wire. It seems too cheap to telegraph collect. With all my love, Jane E”

Then Jane added a postscript –“Gram has been really lovely to us.”  Rosa Sutton’s presence was a comfort to Rose who now regretted the long distance that separated her from her West Coast family more than ever. On May 12, 1930, Rose sent a telegram to her sister: DARLING BE PEACEFUL AM STANDING BY WILL KEEP CHILDREN TOGETHER LOVE ROSE. But it may have been too late. There is no record of whether or not Daysie saw this message on the day she died.

Rose immediately wired the funds for a cemetery plot and sent flowers for Daysie’s grave.  She had now lost a brother and a sister and Rosa Sutton would bury a second adult child, this time at the bottom of a gentle slope at Inglewood Park.

A week later, on May 20, Daysie’s 48th birthday, both Rose and Jane felt her presence. Jane revealed her despair to her aunt with a reference from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar—a speech by Cassius [Act IV, iii]: “I’d like to ‘weep my spirit from mine eyes’ if only I could! Don’t worry about me crying too much. I’d give anything if only I could cry and cry and cry. Instead I just hurt inside. Oh well, maybe it’s a good thing. Mother always said to ‘take it on the chin’ for the sake of those around me, and I hope that’s what I’m doing.” She and Dick wanted to place the statue of an angel on their mother’s grave but Rose may have thought it was too expensive. At least the simple headstone spelled “Daysie” the way she liked it.

As she had done for her father, Jane soon created her own eulogy.

“Dirge –To Mother.”

We swore that death

Would never part us,

But it has.

Death has come between us

Like a slim, cold flame . . .

And you are gone.

Am I the same?

The scythe which cut you down

Took two instead of one,

For two hearts may lie

In a single grave

If those two hearts beat as one.

The life that was you has faded away,

And the hope that was I is gone.

Will that life ever come back,

And that hope be renewed,

In the glow of some distant dawn?

What is the use of going on?

Of living, as they say,

When already a part of me is dead,

And moldering day by day?

I have lost, with you, a sunset’s light,

And the warm, sweet bliss of a desert night . . .

I have lost the luster of crystal joy,

And the sheen of a crested wave.

What is there ahead, when all these are behind,

Deep tucked in your lonely grave?

With you, my heart and soul have flown,

And that park of ambition’s pride

Which means life itself; there is nothing left,

But the mourn of an ebbing tide.

 

This post is Number 11 in a series. Jane’s adventures have barely begun. For an easy way to follow the story from the beginning, go the Blog Tab at the top of the home page, click “Salome to Hollywood” and you will have all the posts on this topic, starting with the most recent. If you are new to the site be sure to read Post No. 1 (the featured post) on the home page first.

 

“Take It on the Chin”

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Image of a Studebaker like “Teresa”

“Mother decided to drive it right home from the store,” Jane recalled in August 1928 when Daysie Hall bought the the boxy Six -Cylinder Special. They named the Studebaker “Teresa,” but before Dickie had even seen it, they had an accident on the less-than-perfect roads. Autos still had no turn signals or rearview mirrors, road tests were not even required for a driver’s license and danger could appear from any direction. Jane had been with Daysie as they headed down Washington Boulevard in Manhattan Beach towards their house. Suddenly another car smacked them “on the front wheel end” until the fender “didn’t look like part of the car.” Insurance covered the cost of repairs. Still, for several days afterwards, Daysie’s side was very sore.

Although her philosophy was to always ”take it on the chin,” the accident was the least of her worries. At some point in 1928, Daysie Hall began to fight for her life. In correspondence with her older sister Rose, she never used the medical name for the mysterious scourge that filled the hearts of patients and doctors with dread.* Instead, they both referred to the malignant tumor in her right breast as “Cappy.” Daysie’s interest in Christian Science, her love for her children and her sad memories of how doctors had failed to save her late husband, made her delay aggressive treatment until March of 1929 when she entered the hospital in Redondo Beach. By April she had been transferred to the California (Lutheran) Hospital on South Hope Street in Los Angeles. Finally, in May, after radium treatments, Daysie could report that “Cappy has noticeably decreased although he looks very formidable.”

That year Dick took the second semester off from Redondo Union High School. Exhausted from his own struggle with mild cerebral palsy that primarily affected his speech and gait, he slept a lot, smoked too much, played chess, probably studied with a tutor and was indispensable as the family chauffeur. Now that they had Teresa, he could bring their gram, Rosa Sutton, back and forth from Los Angeles to the South Bay or drive the auto to the hospital where he kept up his mother’s spirits by pushing her wheelchair up to the roof.

By the early summer, Daysie was home again – supported by codeine until the doctor ordered her to stop taking it. Still in considerable pain, she listened to the radio and tried to walk a few steps every day: “I have regained the reflexes in my knees so I am gradually getting better and better e’en tho at times the slowness of the procedure overcomes me and I almost explode – the last remnant of the tempestuous ego which broadcasts through this frail human body,” she confided to Rose, who had covered all her medical bills and now paid for a nurse named Maggie and a housekeeper. Admitting how ashamed she was to be so dependent, Daysie prayed that her land in Salome would someday be valuable enough to repay her sister. And while forty-nine-year-old Rose recovered from a  second bout with pneumonia, she sent encouraging letters to California from another Manhattan – for some, the more glamorous, sophisticated one.

In September 1929, Dick, Jr. returned to school for his senior year where he was inducted into the Scholarship Society. But what about Jane? She was clearly on an emotional roller coaster, exhilarated by success with her writing and devastated by her mother’s illness. Rose asked her niece what she needed. “What do I crave? For Mother to get well – and stay well. I want that more than anything else in the world,” she answered. But  just “so you can get a ‘line’ on my frivolous nature, these are my minor and comparatively unimportant cravings: a bestseller when I’m in my teens; ice-skating; a water wave every week; Switzerland; a checkerboard bathing suit, and a horse like Silver King. Don’t want much do I?”

1927 Lobby Card Fred Thomson and Silver King

Rose had never heard of “Silver King” and was likely not a fan of the late silent movie star Fred Thomson or his clever pale grey hunter. But Jane was in love with the movies and with horses and dogs. Whenever possible she escaped into daring adventures with “Silver King” and a fearless German shepherd Rin Tin Tin. Her aunt was more inclined to encourage her feminine side and sent Jane dresses– one in dark blue silk with bands of yellow and red, and a second with a matching jacket in flowered orange chiffon.

Rose had seen much more of the world than Daysie. She was by their mother’s side in Washington and Annapolis in 1909 during the high profile second investigation into their brother Jim’s untimely death. Once an aspiring writer herself, Rose studied, traveled and wrote short stories for close to three years while she was in Europe during the Great War. By then she and her husband, Lieut. Hugh A. Parker, had separated by mutual consent and in 1919 she married attorney R. Randolph Hicks, a childless widower with strong roots in Virginia and a practice on Wall Street.  The Hickses lived in a world in which privileged young ladies not much older than Jane went to the Metropolitan Opera or to dances at the Waldorf Astoria in capes and evening gowns. And now their future was uncertain as Rose realized how much support her niece and nephew might require. For on May 2 she had agreed to be the guardian of Daysie’s children if necessary.

It was the end of a prosperous decade;  no one could foresee the economic upheaval that would put millions out of work and demolish the savings and brokerage accounts of the most fortunate Americans. Rose and Randolph Hicks were building their dream house on his family farm in Virginia. And when she began her sophomore year, at least for Jane, there was still hope that a miracle could save her mother.

*See James T. Patterson, The Dread Disease: Cancer and Modern American Culture. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987) on Cancerphobia and shifting attitudes towards doctors and cancer in the early twentieth century.

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“Writer’s Career Shines Bright”

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Redondo Union High School 1928
  • They seemed an unlikely pair as they climbed the wide steps to Redondo Union High School at the beginning of September 1928.  Dick Wick Hall, Jr., a thin, lanky 16-year-old with dark brown curly hair towered over his sturdy younger sister.  “Little Jane” was both eager and apprehensive as they passed through the Ionic columns that guarded the main entrance to the auditorium like silent sentinels. The Beaux-Arts building overlooked the Pacific Ocean; its “stately beauty” reinforced the values that Principal Aileen Hammond and her faculty hoped to instill in their students. Jane had poured over the 1928 yearbook when her brother brought it home in June. This Pilot’s  dedication honored alumnus Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, and Miss Hammond applauded his “severe discipline, modesty, courtesy, and unselfishness,” the same qualities Jane encouraged her readers to cultivate in her stories and essays.

Just a year earlier, on their mother Daysie’s birthday, May 20, Lindbergh had left Long Island for Paris on the single-engine “Spirit of St. Louis.” (The Halls may have seen the Fox Movietone News newsreel of his plane as it took off on the solo transatlantic flight—it was the first news film with sound.) Their uncle, Don Sutton, had been an aviator for the army and, when Jane let her imagination roam, she too longed for the opportunity to soar through the clouds in a small plane. Within the next few years she would.

For now she was one of 429 ninth grade “scrubs” (first semester freshmen) in a navy blue wool pleated skirt topped by a white cotton midi with blue collar and cuffs and black sailor tie – a uniform designed to keep the girls from noticing each other’s taste in fashion or lack of it. She signed up for at least four of the “solid” subjects required each year, choosing French as her Foreign Language because she already spoke Spanish. Then (as now) the school excelled in journalism and, by the end of October 1928, Jane had already become a Literary Assistant on the weekly student paper High Tide.

In the coming months and well into 1929, Jane not only did well in school and kept up her cooking column, she submitted other work that came out in local and Los Angeles papers. It did not take long for the editor of The Redondo Daily Breeze to notice her talent. Passersby saw a sign nailed to the front door of  the Halls’ home at 1148 Manhattan Avenue that identified Jane as ”Manager” of the Manhattan Beach Office of The Breeze. She covered society news, City Hall, Service Club Meetings and other events of interest in the town while demonstrating unusual literary versatility and breadth. Once her homework was done, she wrote poems, stories, editorials, a historical article about opium smuggling in Manhattan Beach, and human interest tales. James Globbins was a gentle, talkative elderly man she had visited in Redondo Hermosa Hospital. He confided to her in Spanish how much he wanted to go to church but he could not leave the hospital – alcoholism had destroyed his health. Jane’s profile was as much a cautionary tale for those who might become “slaves to alcohol” as it was the story of “Jimmy’s” lonely death in June of 1929.  But her splashiest article for The Breeze was a front page feature on Friday, June 14 about the Redondo Union High School graduation.

“Writer’s Career Shines Bright in Future of Young Beach Girl” wrote Jim McGinnis in The Breeze on September 10, 1929.  After noting Dick Wick Hall’s success in The Saturday Evening Post, McGinnis published a poem that had already brought Jane a silver medal in from the prestigious St. Nicholas League and, according to her scrapbook, also came out in The Manhattan News Progress and Hermosa Review.

“Midnight Seen Through an Open Window.”

Deserted streets
And darkened windows.
Roads littered with the shrouds
Of yesterday’s merriment.
Far off, the sound of a brush –
Ceaseless, monotonous as time.
He comes in sight at last –
And old, bent man.
Sweeping up the remains
Of someone’s pleasure.
Banana peels – and empty wrappers.
Wind whips through his tattered coat.
His hands are gnarled, his thin face
Creased with care.
For him, life has been
an empty wrapper . . . .
Fate is cruel.

Jane’s “fourteen-year-old eyes evidently see a part of the burning beauty and piercing truth of the world that is denied to most of its rather blind inhabitants,” Mr. McGinnis observed. “She is quite certain that someday she will be an author. She will.”

 

Many thanks to Therese Martinez and the Archive staff at Redondo Union High School for their help in locating information about Jane Hall and her brother Dick Wick Hall, Jr.

COMMENTS AND QUESTIONS WELCOME –PLEASE USE THE CONTACT BUTTON AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE.

“Do Your Best” – Calamity as Inspiration

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When we last left Jane Hall in Manhattan Beach in the summer of 1928 she had just graduated from the eighth grade and remained focused on her career goals; she defined herself as a writer and the work provided a defense against the unbearable loss of a father who was also her mentor. Her stories and fairy tales about animals or other children often had a moral; her poems spoke of nature, the ocean, an orange tree or the desert where sunbeams hide between the rocks and “a soft, bright, glow, halos the mountainside.” And occasionally she wrote about forgiveness, flirtation, romance and love.

Jane’s prize-winning editorial in the Los Angeles (Junior) Times, “Do Your Best,” emphasized a recurrent theme – be responsible! Everyone has special talents and 13-year-old Jane encouraged young readers to “develop your talents, no matter how insignificant they may seem, or how many obstacles block your progress.” Once in a while when she needed a break from her typewriter, she stuffed down her favorite snack, “jelly doughnuts,” and rode the surf in the nearby Pacific.

Then one day she picked up her pen — or possibly even Dick Wick Hall’s Waterman fountain pen — and wrote in a slender brown composition book about the impact of his death. Even when recording her most private thoughts, she edited her prose in a search for the perfect word.

There is something very contradictory about death. It brings friends so much closer and widens the gap between acquaintances. Since Daddy died mother and Dick and I are bound together by the surest tie there is – the knowledge of what each means to the other. Before, we were just a family – husband, wife two children. Now we are The Three. I think we could get along without ever seeing another person. Just being by ourselves and going to the movies occasionally. I love the movies. When you stop to think about it, which Dick and I do too seldom, it’s really remarkable the way mother has given up her own existence for Dick and me since Daddy died. She doesn’t even go to bridge parties in the afternoon anymore just so she’ll be waiting for us when we get home from school.

Of course we have fun together – we go on picnics and swimming and that sort of thing, but it can’t be as much fun for mother as it is for Dick and me because after all he and I are two of a kind, and while she is our mother and closer than we are to each other, something – I suppose it’s a matter of years – sets her apart. I wonder why we are the way we are? Other men died, and their wives are widows, and lonely and all that, but it doesn’t bring them as close to their children as mother is to Dick and me. I know. I can’t even imagine what it would be like not to have her waiting for us. As a matter of fact, I can but it’s awful. Like looking down a well when you are really dizzy. Ever since Daddy died – it’s been two years now – I’ve had that terrible doubtful feeling in my stomach – when will it be mother? And no matter how secure things seem today, I know it’s got to be sometime. I hope when the time comes we will all three be killed together in an automobile accident or something.

Amid these sobering and prescient thoughts, Jane’s mission to make her father proud kept her going. She had no way of knowing what a devastating struggle the next two years would bring to The Three of them.  And that summer good news came from The Los Angeles Times. Each week for more than a year between August 26, 1928 and the end of 1929, aspiring new chefs read “Jane’s Cooking Corner, Written and Illustrated by Jane E. Hall, Manhattan Beach,” usually with a cartoon-like self portrait at the top. The column would be filled with dozens of recipes and cheerful advice about how her readers could help their mothers in the kitchen.

At about this time, Jane began pasting her published work and articles about her in a scrapbook with linen pages. The dark green front cover is missing and the clippings have turned a mellow beige, but they show the pride she took in her work. And she was fortunate too – in the 1920s newspapers and magazines actively sought submissions by children under 15 who made up almost a third of America’s population. By the time she entered Redondo Union High School in September 1928, Jane already had built up quite a reputation in Manhattan Beach. Before long she would gain some notoriety in Redondo Beach as well.

Click on the images for a close up view and enjoy Jane’s poem about romance and her jingles on how to be thrifty. Try baking the pumpkin pie. Please use the contact tab for any comments or questions.

 

“The Safest Beach in America”

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Manhattan Beach Promotional Flyer 1927 MBHS and Jan Dennis

 When Daysie Hall and her children reached Manhattan Beach in 1927, the area had just begun to come into its own as a popular resort. Much of the shoreline with its massive coastal sand dunes was still undeveloped and flyers eagerly promoted “the safest beach in America.” The 928 foot long pier had been a big attraction ever since its completion in 1920; a large neon sign that spelled out “Manhattan Beach”  welcomed visitors after dark. As many as 360 people at a time could rent bathing suits and change in the large bathhouse available on the land end of the pier. Out on the ocean end they bought tackle and fished or enjoyed the restaurant in the lighted stucco octagonal pavilion. When the weather cooperated, men, women and children in modest bathing wear or fully dressed set up tents or umbrellas and shared picnics on the sand. And there were still rules of decorum. A sign proclaimed that no bathers were allowed on the streets without a robe.*

It must have been hard for tourists to imagine how recently there had been no roads, few boardwalks and no electricity in the area. Mules still had to clear sand and level out the beachfront. But Daysie was not a newcomer. The Sutton Family had lived in Los Angeles between 1890 and 1897 while her father, James Sutton, was General Manager of the

Dick Wick Hall on Venice Beach

Redondo Beach Road. She and her family would come to the area on weekends and she remembered the days when there was much less activity along the South Bay. Every summer California’s beaches had provided the Halls with relief from the desert heat. Daysie would often stay in California with the children for several months while Dick remained in Arizona.

In 1927 Daysie’s first goal was to find an affordable home with access to good schools for Dickie and Jane. A shingled, three-bedroom rental at 1148 Manhattan Avenue on the corner of 12th Street had great appeal.

Manhattan Beach in 1929 with Hall House. MBHS and Jan Dennis.

With their windows open, her family could hear the waves churning up sand. The house sat on a narrow lot at the top of an incline just a short walk from the beach and several shops including a drugstore, bank, market, a bakery and two small restaurants. And perhaps most important, a bus could take Dickie the four miles to and from Redondo Union High School. They settled in before his sophomore year began in September.

Jane continued on track as a frequent author and prizewinner for the Los Angeles Times young writers’ pages while she tackled the responsibilities of eighth grade. By the following summer her skill as a wordsmith had attracted local notice; in July, 1928, the Manhattan Beach Progress editor, Harry Wilson, noted at the top of one of his columns: “There are few who have not heard of the late Dick Wick Hall, the writer, who made Salome, Arizona famous. . .” And with that, he introduced a polished editorial by Jane on her first impressions of Manhattan Beach.**

Proclaiming that Manhattan Grammar School was the best school she  ever attended, Jane gave the town high marks for being “one of the cleanest, neatest, most ‘jazz free’ little communities on the Pacific coast.” It is filled with “real, whole- souled” American citizens who take an interest in everything around them, she wrote. Recalling her father’s skill in marketing Salome’s “Laughing Gas Station” with warmth and humor, she noticed that some shopkeepers in Manhattan Beach were a bit lackadaisical –their wares “are displayed in a rather haphazard fashion.” And, she warned, they needed to be more friendly to the tourists or they would take their business other places such as Hermosa, Redondo or Los Angeles.

Jane’s honesty, spunk and unusual talents soon made her the Manhattan Beach Correspondent for the Redondo Daily Breeze. (More to come in 1/21 post.) She exuded self-confidence in the daytime and yet, when the seagulls were silent and the streets fairly deserted, when only the moon and stars could be seen outside her window, she had trouble sleeping alone in her room. As soon as the house was quiet, Jane confessed in a diary she kept for a few months in 1928, “I go scuffling in to mother.” She was mad at herself for being so “babyish” at thirteen even though both her mother and her beloved gram, Rosa Sutton, could certainly relate to her curiosity and uneasiness about ghosts.

“I would like to see Daddy’s ghost but if it should ever appear when I’m by myself I know I would have a stroke. In the daytime I have myself half believing that such things can’t be and that ghosts don’t exist but in my heart I know they do, because once I saw one out in the corner of my eye. It was on the desert, at night, and it flew around the corner of the house, about a foot off the ground. It was very white and luminous, and I have never in my life been so scared before or since. I would like to know whose ghost it was tho.”

Perhaps that is why, when I was a child, she liked to tell ghost stories and to dare me and my cousins to walk outside in the dark alone at night … But that may be material for another post down the road. Next week we will follow Jane to high school and watch her literary career take off.

Today as Manhattan Beach  celebrates its centennial, it is one of the most beautiful and expensive places to live in the United States. Home values often far exceed $1,000,000. And many residents value the community’s rich heritage as much or more than its real estate. Through its meetings, lectures, publications and its museum in the cottage at Polliwog Park, volunteers at the Manhattan Beach Historical Society keep this history alive.

View of the ocean from near 1148 Manhattan Avenue today

1148 Manhattan Avenue is now Talia’s Italian Restaurant but some of the old structure of the home where Jane lived still remains.

 

 

 

*Both images of Manhattan Beach in the 1920s are at the Manhattan Beach Historical Society. They were also published in Jan Dennis, Manhattan Beach California (Images of America Series). San Francisco, CA: Arcadia Publishing, 2001. Many thanks to Steve Meisenholder, President of the MBHS, for his help with several details as well as information about the original house the Halls rented at 1148 Manhattan Avenue.

**Above the clipping in Jane’s scrapbook, she wrote the date July 11.

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Dick Wick Hall’s Family and His Legacy

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Daysie Hall with Her Children circa 1917

She has addressed the short note to “My Pearls” and her bold scrawl covers the entire page. For the newly widowed Daysie Mae Sutton Hall her children are her life. “Light the fire & be careful it do not pop on the floor. Will be home in due course – all my love to my treasures Mammy.” At the bottom of the page, there is a postscript for her son – she called him “Handsome” just as he often called her “Fairest.”

Few papers survive in Daysie’s handwriting, perhaps because grammar, punctuation and spelling were not her forte. (That may be one reason why she spelled her name phonetically though no one else in her family would use this unusual spelling of “Daisy.”) But Daysie had no trouble at all with the spoken word and had won a gold medal for elocution. An aspiring opera singer, she met Dick in Los Angeles in 1909 while performing at a stage show. Her tall, slender frame lent itself well to the Gibson girl look but when Daysie piled her thick auburn hair on top of her head she often covered it with a large ornate hat. That she was “a woman of remarkable intellect and rare personal charm,” was clear to a Los Angeles Times reporter who spoke with Daysie on May 22, 1910 about her mother Rosa’s unprecedented battle with the United States Navy . (See the home page.) And yet in all the articles in books, magazines and newspapers about Dick Wick Hall, his beloved Daysie – the subject of his numerous love poems – is rarely present.

She was born in 1882 and raised in Portland and Los Angeles. Although she much preferred the climate on California’s coast, Daysie remained in Salome for a year after Dick died. It was her family’s hometown and the only place where they owned property. Daysie and her children could feel Dick’s presence there. Perhaps it’s not surprising, given her own mother’s apparent ability to hear from departed family members, that Daysie also thought she saw Dick’s ghost. For of all Rosa Sutton’s children, Daysie was the most receptive to paranormal experiences.

But she could not take much comfort from her late husband’s modest estate. For years the Halls had lived on a financial roller coaster and Dick’s unexpected death, just as his literary career had taken off, only made Daysie worry more. His primary legacy was clearly his literary output –  his wry humor and down-home philosophy would often be compared to that of his contemporary, Will Rogers. But Daysie had always been more reserved and practical than her husband and she knew her limitations. Early in May 1926 she turned to the one person she trusted, Dick’s editor and mentor, Thomas Masson. Two of his long, thoughtful typed letters to her survive (May 28, 1926 and February 15, 1927). Masson urged her to be cautious around manipulative men who might take advantage of her situation. It would now be up to Daysie to carry on Dick’s work and Masson hoped she would not feel responsible for any of the debts Dick had incurred as an overly optimistic entrepreneur. The letters also reveal Masson’s spiritual side – for him Dick was still:

“much more alive than ever, for his real, immortal self is here, and released from the material bondage. This is what you must see. There is nothing ghostly about it. It is just a fact. Before [he died], he was unable to express himself, because he was earthbound. He was so intensely earthbound that he couldn’t stand it – here. That frequently happens, especially with intense natures. They cannot drop off the material, there is a point from which they cannot go – here. The material structure thus breaks and frees them to express themselves.”

This seems to be a surprising comment for Masson to make because he was so supportive of the way Dick expressed himself in his writing. And yet, in his letters to Daysie, he implied that Dick’s death was in a sense foreordained. And once his spirit was in God’s hands he became truly free.

As for Jane and Dick Jr. they continued to interest Masson “vastly;” he hoped Daysie would “let them alone largely . . . They will come through big, and above all, don’t let them think they are any sort of geniuses.” They were unusual to be sure. Daysie’s tall plucky 14-year-old son with curly dark brown hair, handicapped by cerebral palsy since birth, was gifted in science and math and an expert at chess despite his awkward gait and slow speech . Eleven-year-old Jane idolized her father and was more determined than ever to follow in his footsteps as a writer, and to help her mother by selling her own poems and stories .

By the summer of 1927, ” Dickie” as Jane called him, had benefited greatly from a tutor and was ready for sophomore year. Daysie knew she must find good schools for the children and so the Halls headed for Los Angeles where Rosa Sutton eagerly waited for her family . But Rosa’s large personality and small living quarters motivated Daysie to start house hunting quickly. She focused on finding affordable rental housing in Manhattan Beach, near the Pacific Ocean and only a short bus ride from Redondo Union High School. It would be from this new location that little Jane Hall’s career began to flourish as she thought often of her daddy and of the impact of his death on her family .

We will join the Halls in Manhattan Beach in the January posts and returned to Arizona occasionally. For in her heart, Jane never totally left the desert and Salome; when she reached Hollywood she noticed that many of her colleagues remembered her father too. Jane would hold up a mirror to those who were caught up in the pretensions of high society just as her father had done in his stories and columns, She even took on his habit of capitalizing nouns unexpectedly – editors did not seem to object .

Part Two: How Do We Know What We Know?

As a historian and as the granddaughter of Dick and the daughter of Jane Hall , I’m writing these posts with both a personal and professional perspective. Although I never met Rosa Sutton or Dick Wick and Daysie Hall, I have come to know them through what they wrote and what was written about them, as well as by visiting the places where they lived. My mother rarely spoke about her early life, but she left an archive that provides an intriguing window into her private thoughts, her published observations and into the life of an American girl in the first three decades of the 20th century . When she died, Jane had not been well for many years and it was easier, at first, to immerse myself in her father’s papers.  I have made several trips to Salome, often with one or both of my daughters. Twice we had the great privilege of being in the “Dick Wick Hall Days” parade. Dick’s most visible legacy today lies in Salome and in the other towns of the McMullen Valley among people who find creative ways to preserve memories of the past.

And there are those throughout Arizona who still appreciate Dick’s philosophy and shrewd marketing skills– his writings put Salome on statewide and national maps. Today Fry’s Electronics store in Tempe (2300 West Baseline Road) is celebrating Arizona’s Golf History with a series of murals. Two large murals are already up near the software and service departments that feature Dick’s Greasewood Golf Course and Dick with his Salome Frog and the famous stick figure image of Salome in a desert setting. Perhaps this is a perfect example of Masson’s claim that, after he died, Dick was much more alive than ever.

There are many articles about Dick Wick Hall in books, pamphlets, newspapers and in magazines such as Arizona Highways. Two well-documented ones appeared in the Journal of Arizona History (Winter, 1970 and Spring, 1984). Hall’s business papers can be found at various locations such as the Arizona Historical Society (Tucson and Yuma Branches), and the Arizona State Library (Archives and Public Records) in Phoenix. Several letters from Jane, written when she was about seven to nine years old, are among the Hall papers in Tucson (MS 321). An internet search of “Dick Wick Hall” brings up several resources (including images) some of which are more reliable than others.

Dick’s pen, his aneroid barometer* in the shape of a gold pocket watch, a stamp with his signature, a glass office sign with  “D.W. Hall” in gold letters against a black background, some stationary, photo albums, his personal papers including many letters and love poems to Daysie that have never been made public stayed with his daughter Jane. She always wanted to write about her father and to publish a collection of his writings. But “real life” in the form of other obligations intervened. Although Jane objected because she hoped to do it herself, we owe a lot to the late Frances D. Nutt who did just that in 1990 with An Arizona Alibi: The Desert Humor of Dick Wick Hall, Sr. — Arizona’s First Famous Humorist. The forward by Barry Goldwater (1909-1998) reveals that he was a big Dick Wick Hall fan. Like the Halls, Senator Goldwater’s family made the trip from Arizona to California every summer when he was a child “to get away from the heat of Phoenix and the desert.” He remembered stopping in Salome. ”There will never be another Dick Wick Hall unless another community finds a need for one, ” he wrote, “and then they are going to have to invent him.”

*It was identified with the help of Laraine Daly Jones, Museums Collections Manager at the Arizona Historical Society, Southern Division (Tucson) who found the link (above) and explained that “an aneroid barometer measures air pressure without the use of liquid mercury.” For additional information about Hall’s papers at the Arizona Historical Society contact archivist Christine Seliga (Tucson), or AHSref AT azhs.gov  or Carol Brooks (Yuma).

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Christmas in Salome, Arizona 1925

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Happy Holidays to all!

This illustration of ”Our Christmas Tree“ appeared in The Salome Sun in 1925. No one imagined it would be Dick Wick Hall’s last Christmas (see prior post).  Dick added the following thoughts using  the sporadic upper case letters that became his signature and some deliberately questionable grammar:  ”Christmas comes pretty near getting by here without noticing us much Much and Vice Versa and Nobody remembered it was Christmas Day until December 25, which happened to be Christmas day – even if we didn’t think of it . . .Archie Bald Doveface reminded us of it.… He also said Folks out here ought to Respect Christmas because Christ come from the desert – but Scar Face Scroggs says if he did he sure had Sense Enough to Leave it; all of which I don’t pretend to Argue About. . . . You can’t very well have a Tree out here where there ain’t nothing much but greasewood and sagebrush, so we compromised by using the Big Cactus near our Office and everybody had a Good Time excepting Happy Jack Aagaard, who volunteered to act as Santa Claus and had to climb up to Light the Candles and Get the Presents while the Reptyle Kid played A Hot Time on the Harmonica . . . The Frog got more Presents than anybody, including a Canteen of Water and a Bath Tub.”

If Dick Wick Hall were alive today you can be sure he would have fun writing posts about ways to improve life in what is now La Paz County (and used to be Yuma County), about the challenges of Golf in the Desert, the adventures of his Frog, the trouble with Easterners and promoting his latest business venture; many posts would poke fun at Society Ladies. And, as Dick was buried near this very same Saguaro, we will end the year on December 31 with a few observations about his ghost and his legacy–with some more insights from Tom Masson who thought Dick never really died. And he has a point about that.

Next month we will follow the Hall family to Los Angeles and Manhattan Beach, California where Jane kept on writing and made quite a success of it . So let’s give Dick the last word and see what he had to say about California: “Folks who have Never Been to California, or those who have Been There Once and can’t get back again, they all Dream of it – a good deal like Women who have Never Had any Pink Silk Undies, or those who Have Had Them and can’t get any more. California, in many ways, Is a good deal like Pink Silk Undies. It Takes Money to live in or Explore the Wonders and Beauties of California –and that is what a Lot of us are Working for –the Money to get either into California  or Pink Silk Undies – and Dreaming of the Good Times we will have When We Get There.”*

*From The Salome Sun

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“A Genius Passed Away”

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Encouraged by her father’s success with his now syndicated Salome Sun and his stories in the The Saturday Evening Post, “little Jane” kept on scribbling. During the fall and winter of 1925 – 1926, more of her poems were published and her biography of a little colt– told from his point of view– came out in the Los Angeles Times on December 3, 1925. Jane had high standards for herself and those around her. In a new red leather diary for 1926, she gave herself marching orders for the year.

1. Don’t be so saucy to Daddy.

2. Be more conciderate. [sic]

3. Don’t primp so much.

4. Help mother more.

Within a few months, Jane’s efforts attracted notice outside Salome. On a fortuitous Friday in late March—the 26th to be exact– the Yuma Morning Sun proclaimed in a small headline on its front page: “ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD SALOME GIRL IS WRITER OF FAIRYTALE WITH MOST IMPRESSIVE MORAL; SHOWS GENIUS.” “Up in Salome—made famous by Dick Wick Hall–,” the editorial comment began, “where the desert is just a little bit more desert than anywhere else in Arizona, there seems to be something in the air that produces a peculiar type of genius.” Jane’s composition followed. “How My Wish Was Granted” is a first-person tale of a melancholy little girl who has gone swimming in a small cove. Suddenly, the voice of a mermaid barely three inches high interrupts her thoughts. The mermaid grants her one wish and a mere twelve seconds to decide what it will be. The girl does not ask for anything extravagant but for a wreath of coral just like the one the mermaid has in her “dark lustrous hair.” The mermaid is so pleased at this modest request that she adds the gift of perfect happiness to the wreath. The little girl reveals, ” . . .the heavy sense of depression that I had for the last few days left me, suddenly, and I felt perfectly happy.”

But the mood in the Hall household had changed at the beginning of April. Dick Wick Hall had gone to Los Angeles for some tooth extractions and run up against severe complications. On April 13 he typed a note to his wife from the Hotel Hayward. He was desperately homesick; his eyes brimmed with tears when he found a rose that Daysie had left in his bag and a sweet note from Jane in his typewriter. The next day, Dick’s doctors discovered that he had acute kidney disease. Jane, her mother, her thirteen-year-old brother, Dickie, as well as her uncle, Ernie,* were at his bedside at the small Angeles Hospital when Dick Wick Hall died on Wednesday, April 28 at about one in the afternoon.

There was no question about where Dick would be buried. On Sunday, May 2, eight leather-skinned pallbearers carried his casket to a modest garden next to the office in Salome where Dick and his daughter had worked so diligently for much of her childhood. And there he would lie for generations to come next to a tall Saguaro. In the coming months, friends erected a small obelisk out of quartz and other local stone for a man whose quirky characters, sage advice and wry humor had given them a reason to smile. The town of Salome still celebrates “Dick Wick Hall Days” every autumn. And Jane Hall – whose journey had just begun – paid homage to the most important man in her life in the way she knew best.

To Daddy

When the blossom graced the cactus

And the fields were sweet with hay,

When the birds were singing in the trees,

A genius passed away.

 

In the joyous month of April

Just two days from merry May,

A man who made the whole world laugh

My father, passed away.

 

Of all the mortals in this world,

Our Lord has picked the best,

For on the 28th of April

My Daddy went to Rest.

 

*Ernest Hall, Dick’s younger brother, was Arizona’s third Secretary of State and occasional acting governor between 1921 and 1923.

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